by Jo Nesbo
‘She’ll remember,’ Knut said. ‘Come on.’
Knut danced ahead of me on the path. The heather brushed my trouser legs and the midges buzzed around our heads. The plateau.
‘Ulf?’
‘Yes?’
‘Why have you got such long hair?’
‘Because no one’s cut it.’
‘Oh.’
Twenty seconds later.
‘Ulf?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Do you know any Finnish?’
‘No.’
‘Sámi?’
‘Not a word.’
‘Just Norwegian?’
‘And English.’
‘Are there lots of English people down in Oslo?’
I squinted at the sun. If it was the middle of the day, that meant we were walking more or less directly west. ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘But it’s a global language.’
‘A global language, yes. That’s what Grandpa says too. He says Norwegian is the language of common sense. But Sámi is the language of the heart. And Finnish is the holy language.’
‘If he says so.’
‘Ulf?’
‘Yes?’
‘I know a joke.’
‘Okay.’
He stopped and waited for me to catch up, then set off beside me through the heather. ‘What keeps going but never reaches the door?’
‘That’s a riddle, isn’t it?’
‘Shall I tell you the answer?’
‘Yes, I think you’re going to have to.’
He shaded his eyes with his hand and grinned up at me. ‘You’re lying, Ulf.’
‘Sorry?’
‘You know the answer!’
‘Do I?’
‘Everyone knows the answer to that riddle. Why do you all keep lying? You’ll end up—’
‘Burning in hell?’
‘Yes!’
‘Who are “you all”?’
‘Dad. And Uncle Ove. And Mum.’
‘Really? What does your mum lie about?’
‘She says there’s no need for me to worry about Dad. Now it’s your turn to tell a joke.’
‘I’m not much good at telling jokes.’
He stopped and leaned forward, with his arms dangling towards the heather. ‘You can’t hit a target, you don’t know anything about grouse, and you can’t tell jokes. Is there anything you can do?’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said, as I watched a solitary bird drift on its wings high above us. Watching. Hunting. Something about its stiff, angled wings made me think of a war plane. ‘I can hide.’
‘Yes!’ His head shot up. ‘Let’s play hide-and-seek! Who’s going to start? Eeny, meeny, miny mo . . .’
‘You run ahead and hide.’
He ran three paces and then stopped abruptly.
‘What is it?’
‘You’re only saying that because you want to get rid of me.’
‘Get rid of you? Never!’
‘Now you’re lying again!’
I shrugged. ‘We can play the being-quiet game. Anyone who isn’t completely quiet gets shot in the head.’
He gave me a funny look.
‘Not for real,’ I said. ‘Okay?’
He nodded, his mouth tight shut.
‘From now,’ I said.
We walked and walked. The scenery which had looked so monotonous from a distance was constantly changing, from soft, earthy browns covered by green and reddish-brown heather, to stony, scarred lunar landscapes, and suddenly – in the light of the sun which had turned half a revolution since I arrived, like a golden red discus – it looked like it was glowing, as though lava were running down the gently sloping hillsides. Above it all was a vast, broad sky. I don’t know why it seemed so much bigger here, or why I imagined I could see the curvature of the earth. Maybe it was lack of sleep. I’ve read that people can become psychotic after just two days without sleep.
Knut marched on in silence, with a determined look on his freckled face. There were more clouds of midges now, until eventually they formed one great big swarm that we couldn’t escape. I’d stopped swatting them when they landed on me. They punctured my skin with their anaesthetised bites, and the whole business was so gentle that I left them to it. The important thing was that I was putting metre after metre – kilometres – between me and civilisation. Even so, I needed to come up with a plan soon.
The Fisherman always finds what he’s looking for.
The plan up to now had been not to have a plan, seeing as he would be able to predict every logical plan I could come up with. My only chance was unpredictability. Acting so erratically that even I didn’t know what my next move was going to be. But I’d have to think of something after that. If there was any ‘after that’.
‘A clock,’ Knut said. ‘The answer’s a clock.’
I nodded. It was only a matter of time.
‘And now you can shoot me in the head, Ulf.’
‘Okay.’
‘Go on, then!’
‘What for?’
‘To get it over with. There’s nothing worse than not knowing when the bullet’s coming.’
‘Bang.’
‘Did you get teased at school, Ulf?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘You’ve got a weird way of talking.’
‘Everyone talks like this where I grew up.’
‘Wow. Did they all get teased, then?’
I couldn’t help laughing. ‘Okay, I got teased a bit. When I was ten years old my parents died, and I moved from the east side of Oslo to the west, to live with my grandfather, Basse. The other kids called me Oliver Twist and east-end trash.’
‘But you’re not.’
‘Thanks.’
‘You’re south-side trash.’ He laughed. ‘That was a joke! That’s three you owe me now.’
‘I wish I knew where you got them all from, Knut.’
He screwed one eye shut and squinted at me. ‘Can I carry the rifle?’
‘No.’
‘It’s my dad’s.’
‘I said no.’
He groaned, and drooped his head and arms for a few seconds, then straightened again. We sped up. He sang quietly to himself. I couldn’t swear to it, but it sounded like a hymn. I thought about asking him what his mother’s name was – it might be useful to know when I needed to go back to the village. If I couldn’t remember where the house was, for instance. But for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to ask.
‘There’s the cabin,’ Knut said, and pointed.
I got the binoculars out and adjusted the focus, which you have to do with both lenses on a B8. Behind the dancing midges lay something that looked more like a small woodshed than a cabin. No windows, from what I could see, just a collection of unpainted, grey, dried-out planks gathered around a thin, black chimney pipe.
We carried on walking, and my mind must have been on something else entirely when my eyes registered a movement, something much bigger than the midges, something a hundred metres ahead of us, something suddenly emerging from the monotonous landscape. My heart felt as though it stopped for a moment. There was an odd clicking sound as the heavy-antlered creature ran off through the heather.
‘A buck,’ Knut declared.
My pulse slowly calmed down. ‘How do you know it’s not a . . . er, one of the other sort?’
He gave me that funny look again.
‘We don’t get many reindeer in Oslo,’ I said.
‘A doe. Because bucks have bigger horns, don’t they? See, it’s rubbing them against that tree.’
The reindeer had stopped in a cluster of trees behind the cabin and was rubbing its antlers against a birch trunk.
‘Is it scraping off bark to eat?’
He laughed. ‘Reindeer eat lichen.’
Of course, reindeer eat lichen. We’d learned about the types of moss that grow up here close to the North Pole in school. That a joik was a sort of improvised shouting in Sámi, that a lavvo was a form of Indian teepee, and that Finnmark wa
s further away from Oslo than London or Paris. We also learned a way of remembering the names of the fjords, although I doubt anyone could recall what it was now. Not me, anyway – I’d made it through fifteen years of education, two of them at university, even, by half-remembering things.
‘They rub their horns to clean them,’ Knut said. ‘They do that in August. When I was little, Grandpa said it was because their horns itched so badly.’
He smacked his lips like an old man, as if to lament how naive he had once been. I could have told him that some of us never stop being naive.
The cabin stood on four large rocks. It wasn’t locked, but I had to tug the door handle hard to loosen it from the frame. Inside were a pair of bunk beds with woollen blankets, and a wood-burning stove with a dented kettle and a casserole dish sitting on its two hotplates. There was an orange wall cupboard, a red plastic bucket, two chairs and a table that leaned towards the west, either because it was crooked or because the floor was uneven.
The cabin did have windows. The reason I hadn’t seen them was that they were just embrasures, narrow slits in all the walls except for the one with the door in it. But they let in enough light, and you could see anything approaching from every direction. Even when I walked the three steps from one end of the cabin to the other and felt the whole building wobble like a French coffee table, it didn’t change my initial conclusion: the cabin was perfect.
I looked round and thought of the first thing Grandfather said when he had carried my trunk up to his house and unlocked it: Mi casa es tu casa. And even though I didn’t understand a word, I still guessed what it meant.
‘Do you want coffee before you walk back?’ I asked nonchalantly as I opened the wood-burning stove. Fine grey ash blew out.
‘I’m ten years old,’ Knut said. ‘I don’t drink coffee. You need wood. And water.’
‘So I see. A slice of bread, then?’
‘Have you got an axe? Or a knife?’
I looked at him without replying. He looked up at the ceiling in response. A hunter with no knife.
‘You can borrow this for the time being,’ Knut said, reaching behind his back and pulling out an enormous knife with a broad blade and a yellow wooden handle.
I turned the knife in my hand. Heavy, but not too heavy, and nicely balanced. Pretty much the way a pistol should feel.
‘Did you get this from your dad?’
‘From Grandpa. It’s a Sámi knife.’
We agreed that he would gather wood while I fetched water. He evidently liked being given a grown-up task, and grabbed the knife back and ran out. I found a loose plank in the wall. Behind it, between the two walls, was a sort of insulation made of moss and turf, and I pushed the money belt into that. I could hear the sound of steel against wood from the clump of trees as I filled the plastic bucket in the stream that ran just a hundred metres from the cabin.
Knut put some kindling and bark in the stove while I cleared the mouse shit from the cupboard and put the food away. I lent him my matches and before long the stove was alight and the kettle was hissing. Some smoke leaked out, and I noticed that the midges were holding back. I took the opportunity to take my shirt off and splash some water from the bucket on my face and upper body.
‘What’s that?’ Knut asked, pointing.
‘This?’ I said, taking hold of the dog tag hanging round my neck. ‘Name and date of birth engraved on bombproof metal, so they know who they’ve killed.’
‘Why would they want to know that?’
‘So they know where to send the skeleton.’
‘Ha, ha,’ he said drily. ‘Doesn’t count as a joke.’
The hissing of the kettle was replaced by a warning rumble. As I filled one of the two chipped coffee cups, Knut was already halfway through his second thick slice of bread with liver pâté. I blew on the black, greasy surface of the coffee.
‘What does coffee taste like?’ Knut asked with his mouth full.
‘The first time’s always the worst,’ I said, and took a sip. ‘Eat up, then you’d better get going before your mum wonders where you are.’
‘She knows where I am.’ He put both elbows on the table and leaned his head on his hands, pushing his cheeks up over his eyes. ‘Joke.’
The coffee tasted perfect, and the cup warmed my hands. ‘Have you heard the one about the Norwegian, the Dane and the Swede, who had a bet to see who could lean furthest out of the window?’
He took his arms off the table and stared at me expectantly. ‘No.’
‘They were sitting on the windowsill. And suddenly the Norwegian won.’
In the silence that followed I took another sip. I assumed from Knut’s gawping expression that he hadn’t figured out that was the end of the joke.
‘How did he win?’ he asked.
‘How do you think? The Norwegian fell out of the window.’
‘So the Norwegian bet on himself?’
‘Obviously.’
‘Not obviously. You should have said that from the start.’
‘Okay, but you get the point,’ I sighed. ‘So what do you think?’
He put one finger under his freckled chin and stared thoughtfully into space. Then came two loud bursts of laughter. Then more thoughtful staring.
‘A bit short,’ he said. ‘But that’s probably what makes it funny. Bang – it’s all over. Well, it made me laugh.’ He laughed a bit more.
‘Speaking of things being over . . .’
‘Of course,’ he said, standing up. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow.’
‘Really? Why?’
‘Midge oil.’
‘Midge oil?’
He took my hand and put it to my forehead. It was like bubble wrap, bump upon bump.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Bring midge oil. And beer.’
‘Beer? Then you’ll—’
‘Burn in hell?’
‘Have to go to Alta.’
I thought about the smell in his father’s workroom. ‘Hooch.’
‘Huh?’
‘Home brew. Moonshine. Whatever your father drinks. Where does he get it from?’
Knut shifted his weight a couple of times. ‘Mattis.’
‘Hmm. Bow-legged little fellow in a torn anorak?’
‘Yes.’
I took a note out of my pocket. ‘See how much you can get with this, and get yourself an ice cream. Unless that’s a sin, of course.’
He shook his head and took the note. ‘Goodbye, Ulf. And keep the door closed.’
‘Oh, there probably isn’t room for any more midges in here.’
‘Not midges. Wolves.’
Was he kidding?
When he had gone I picked up the rifle and rested it on one of the sills. I looked through the sights as I swept the horizon. I found Knut as he skipped away down the path. I carried on towards the little patch of woodland. I found the buck. At that moment it raised its head, as if it could sense me. As far as I knew, reindeer were herd animals, so this one must have been expelled. Like me.
I went and sat down outside the cabin and drank the rest of the coffee. The heat and the smoke from the stove had given me a thumping headache.
I looked at the time. Almost one hundred hours had passed now. Since I should have died. One hundred bonus hours.
When I looked out again the buck had come closer.
CHAPTER 3
ONE HUNDRED HOURS ago.
But it had started long before that. Like I said, I don’t know how. Let’s say it started a year earlier, the day Brynhildsen came over to me in Slottsparken. I was stressed out: I’d only just discovered she was ill.
Brynhildsen had a hook nose and a pencil moustache, and had lost his hair early. He had worked for Hoffmann before the Fisherman inherited him, along with the rest of Hoffmann’s estate – in other words, his share of the heroin market, his woman, and a big apartment on Bygdøy allé. Brynhildsen said the Fisherman wanted to talk to me, and that I should report to the fish shop. Then he walked away.
Gr
andfather was very fond of the Spanish proverbs he had picked up when he lived in Barcelona, drawing his version of La Sagrada Família. One of the ones I heard most often was: ‘There weren’t many of us in the house, and then Grandma got pregnant.’ It meant something along of the lines of: ‘As if we didn’t already have enough problems.’
All the same, I turned up at the Fisherman’s shop on Youngstorget the next day. Not because I wanted to, but because the alternative – not turning up – was out of the question. The Fisherman was too powerful. Too dangerous. Everyone knew the story of how he had cut Hoffmann’s head off, saying that was what happened when you got ideas above your station. Or the story of two of his dealers who suddenly disappeared after helping themselves to a share of the goods. No one ever saw them again. There were those who claimed the fish balls from his shop had been extra tasty in the following few months. He did nothing to stop the rumours. That’s how a businessman like the Fisherman defends his territory, with a mixture of rumour, half-truths and hard facts about what happens to people who try to trick him.
I hadn’t tried to trick the Fisherman. Even so, I was sweating like a junkie going cold turkey as I stood in his shop and told one of the older women behind the counter who I was. I don’t know if she pressed a buzzer or something, but the Fisherman came out through the swing door behind them immediately afterwards, with a broad smile, dressed from head to toe in white – a white cap, white shirt and apron, white trousers, white wooden shoes – and extended his big, wet hand to me.
We went into the back room. White tiles on the floor and all the walls. The benches along the walls were covered with metal dishes containing corpse-pale fillets marinating in brine.
‘Sorry about the smell, Jon, I’m making fish balls.’ The Fisherman pulled out a chair from under the metal table in the middle of the room. ‘Sit down.’
‘I only sell hash,’ I said, as I did what he told me. ‘Never speed or heroin.’
‘I know. The reason I wanted to talk to you is that you killed one of my employees. Toralf Jonsen.’
I stared at him, speechless. I was dead. I was going to become fish balls.
‘Very clever, Jon. And it was a smart move to make it look like a suicide – everyone knew Toralf could be a little . . . gloomy.’ The Fisherman tore off part of one fillet and popped it in his mouth. ‘Even the police didn’t think his death was suspicious. I have to admit that I thought he’d shot himself as well. Until an acquaintance in the police quietly informed us that the pistol that was found next to him was registered in your name. Jon Hansen. So we took a closer look. That was when Toralf’s girlfriend told us he owed you money. That you’d tried to get it off him a couple of days before he died. That’s right, isn’t it?’